TweakTown News Posts - Page 2308

ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer is facing a hard time meeting consumer demand, not because it's not popular but because ASUS can't make enough of them! ASUS is finding it hard securing supplies needed to manufacturer the Android-powered tablet and for now, production is limited to 10, 000 per month. Keep in mind that ASUS were hoping for 300, 000 units per month - so as you can see, this is not good enough.

Great quantities are coming and production will then receive the domino effect, yet this won't come until June. For now, ASUS will have to keep this robot in disguise.

This rumor has been floating the tubes for a while but according to AppleInsider, they were tipped off by people "familiar with the matter" that the refresh of the iMacs will happen tomorrow. On top of the Sandy Bridge upgrade they'll receive Thunderbolt just like the new MacBook Pros.

We should see the same GPU that powers the MacBook Pros in the new Sandy Bridge iMacs which is the Radeon HD 6000-series. Screen wise there should be the same models, right up to a 27-inch, 2560x1440 beast. Here's hoping the price comes down with the new specs!

Microsoft pulled in a total of $30.4 billion in 2010 for worldwide operating system revenue, a decent 7.8-percent growth from 2009. In terms of OS market share, Microsoft are still king with 78.6-percent in terms of revenue, with Apple way behind with only 1.7-percent.

IBM, HP, Oracle and Red Hat each did better than Apple (!) with 7.5, 3.7, 2.6 and 2.0-percent of the market respectively. Microsoft's Windows client business had decent growth of 9.2-percent compared with the Server side of their business with only 7.5-percent. It's good to see Microsoft still king of the OS battle and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

RIM are still holding onto the smartphone market and have shown this by debuting a couple of new smartphones that RIM are claiming to be the thinnest and most powerful Blackberry devices yet. The new smartphones are also powered by the new Blackberry 7 OS, the two models? Blackberry Bold 9900 and 9930.

Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO of Research in Motion has said:

The new BlackBerry Bold smartphones and BlackBerry 7 OS are inspired by millions of customers around the world who want the ultimate combination of performance, functionality and style. These fully-loaded and beautifully crafted smartphones offer a highly refined user experience with blazingly fast performance, a brilliant touch screen and an outstanding typing experience.

In case you live under a rock, or in a multi-acre off-the-grid "luxury" Pakistani compound, Osama Bin Laden is officially dead and accounted for, thanks to a successful Covert Ops mission yesterday. Not only did the news start pouring in on Twitter before mainstream media had time to compose stories and segments of greater than 140 characters, but the announcement saw the highest sustained tweets per second (TPS) ever.

The above is the "first" tweet that alerted the Twitterverse to the impending media onslaught, posted 10:25PM EST May 1, yesterday by Keith Urbahn, former Chief of Staff for Donal Rumsfeld, himself the former Secretary of Defense under the George W. Bush administration, one that made the search for Bin Laden a primary ideological focus. It seems that the news itself was actually broken, retroactively, by a resident of Abbottabad, Soahib Athar (Twitter user @reallyvirtual).

At 11PM EST, the announcement of Bin Laden's death came in at over 5000 TPS, outdoing every other major Twitter event in the social network's history with the exception of the Japanese New Year's Eve 2010, which peaked at over 6000 TPS. The Bin Laden announcement however sustained a 3,440 TPS for over 3 hours, the longest and highest sustained TPS ratio.

Other notable Twitter events include last week's Royal Wedding (now sixth all-time), the Japanese Earthquake & Pacific Tsunami (p

Sony has had a rough few weeks. After repeated outages and system troubles with its PlayStation Network (PSN) and Qrocity services, evidently the target of an online intrusion that revealed secure data like credit card numbers and other user information, Sony is no experiencing issues with its Online Entertainment network (SOE).

We had to temporarily take down SOE services during the night. In the course of our investigation into the intrusion of our systems, we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern. We will provide an update later today.

I can only imagine that "an issue that warrants concern" is related to more credit card and user information being at risk. Sony is not at this time providing a timetable for how long the service will be down, but the action affects all players of DC Universe Online, the EverQuest series of MMO's, Freerealms, Star Wars Galaxies, and Planetside, which are all effectively offline until further notice. We might see an update later, so we'll keep you posted.

Well I'll be damned. This was more enjoyable that most of those crazy trick shot videos you see on YouTube all the time. In my opinion, that's because this stuff would be harder to fake (I know that seems counter-intuitive, but just think about it for a second). For all of you that haven't gotten the chance to try out Valve's new installation of the puzzle-solving, viusally-mesmerizing Portal franchise, then this video is a great way to get hooked.

YouTube user Schrobotindisguise posted this video after he, well, got bored (note: this is a very rare occurrence and I cannot even fathom the amount of time one would need to play Portal 2 before actually getting bored. This dude must be a pro. With a lot of spare time):

While i'm waiting for the inevitable challenge chambers and leaderboards, i thought i'd set my own challenges to increase the re-playability of Portal 2......turns out chucking cubes about was sufficient!

As you can see in the video, Schrobot has found a very inventive way of solving the Portal 2 puzzles, trying to ensure that each time he uses one of the stock cubes in the game. Also, don't forget about this summer's DLC, mentioned above!

As of last Friday you could use augmented reality facial tracking to turn yourself into Prince William or Princess Kate, but Aptronic has done it again with their ZombieMirror AR+ iOS application for the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 (you need the rear-facing camera).

Yes, that includes Scruffy, the family Zombie. Er, I mean, cat.

Much like the Royal Wedding app (also by Aptronic), the ZombieMirror application utilizes the facial-tracking SDK of Paris / Los Angeles-based AR solutions firm Total Immersion to recognize your face (or the face of a friend or random passerby- though I highly discourage trying to take photos of people you don't know) and overlay digital information on top of it- in this case, Zmobification awesomeness. You can also "configure" your Zombie visage to include or omit effects like pockmarked cheek, dangling eye, and, quite simply, hatchet- amongst other things.